It is known to tilt the backrests of the front seats of two-door passenger cars right forward, possibly as far as the seat, to enable persons to get into and out of the back seats, and if necessary to move the whole seat forward by means of the adjusting means. However, this operation requires considerable effort, since the seat and the backrest also have to be moved back into the desired position.
In addition, the distance the seat can be moved forward is generally too short for comfort in getting into and out of the back seats. It generally amounts to about 200 mm, and cannot be increased because the seats can only be moved forward parallel to the floor. In the case of two-door vehicles space for getting in and out is above all particularly limited in the foot region. To increase the amount of travel the lower outer adjusting rails would have to be made longer, but as metal parts they would then be felt to get in the way of the feet of the persons seated both in the front and in the back.
This is generally remedied by extending the doors of such two-door vehicles farther back, in the interest of improved access to the back seats, than would be necessary only for access to the back seats. However, this object is only partly achieved, since limits are set to the increase in size of these doors on grounds of manufacture, strength and appearance. If, as is generally the case, there is a choice of availability of a particular type of vehicle with either two or four doors, there is the further disadvantage that two different front doors have to be manufactured for the same basic model, with corresponding differences in the bodywork, which increases the expense.
The invention aims to solve the problem of enabling the seats, preferably so-called three-legged seats, of a two-door passenger car with two rows of seating to be moved in a simple manner so far forward that getting into and out of the back seats is facilitated by larger clearances even without increasing the door size, so that there is enough room, particularly in the foot region, for the persons getting in and out.
Particular advantages obtained through the invention are that both getting into and out of, and also loading and unloading of, the back seats of two-door passenger cars with two rows of seating are facilitated at little cost in apparatus and operating effort without the front doors having to be made larger for the two-door version in the case of types of vehicle that are available with two or four doors, since the necessary free space is provided by the displacement of the seats by tilting in the way proposed. It is particularly beneficial that through the large forward displacement and tilting up of the front seat the space for getting into the back seats is markedly increased over the whole body region and not just for the feet. If on grounds of comfort the size of the access region of the front doors is further increased, getting into and out of the back seats of the two-door, two-row seating embodiments becomes particularly easy and the back seats are easier to load and unload.
Advantageous embodiments of the invention are set forth in the claims.
Exemplary embodiments of the invention are illustrated in the drawings and will now be described more fully.